Field and Theory: Lectures in Geocryology

Robert J. Sawyer is a Toronto-based free-lance writer.

Michael Church and Olav Slaymaker are members of the geography department at the University of British Columbia. Field and Theory is a collection of ten papers that were originally presented at UBC in 1980 and 1981 in honour of J. Ross MacKay’s retirement as Professor of Geography. The prefaces and abstracts appear in French and Russian as well as English. The lead paper, by UBC’s W.H. Mathews, looks at the career of Professor MacKay, whose forte was using simple principles of physics to explain a wide range of landscape variations. Other papers include “The Ice Factor in Frozen Ground,” by the National Research Council’s L.W. Gold; “Models of Soil Freezing,” by Carleton University’s M.W. Smith; and “Extreme Rainfall and Rapid Snowmelt as Causes of Mass Movements in High Latitude Mountains,” by the Swede Anders Rapp. All but one of the lectures has been fleshed out with charts or photographs. The editors identify a central theme of the papers: the difficulty of testing theories in a science where all field work must be done in bitterly cold conditions. There are extensive notes on each contributor, a good index, and a supplementary index to author citations.